Bleach is commonly used to whiten soiled fabrics during laundry operations. The most common bleach is aqueous sodium hypochlorite referred to as chlorine bleach. Chlorine bleach is effective and cheap but has certain disadvantages. It cannot be mixed with the detergent in a single package. It tends to attack certain dyes and also degrades fabrics. In addition, fabrics having a resin finish (wash and wear fabrics) are given a noticeable yellow tint by chlorine bleach.
In order to overcome these disadvantages, another class of laundry bleach has come into use. This class is referred to as peroxygen bleach. These materials are very effective whitening agents and are much safer with dyed fabrics. In addition they do not yellow wash and wear fabrics. Many can be packaged together with a detergent and other components to form a single detergent-bleach laundry package.
Although peroxygen bleaches have these many attributes, they have several drawbacks. They are more expensive compared to chlorine bleach and also are not effective unless the wash solution is at a temperature high enough to activate the peroxygen compound. For example, sodium perborate requires a water temperature above about 160.F which is higher than that usually attained in domestic laundry operations. In order to lower the temperature at which peroxygen bleach can be used, resort is had to "bleach activators". These are compounds that by themselves have no bleaching action but when used in combination with a peroxygen bleach form a peroxygen compound which is effective at lower temperatures than the initial peroxygen bleach. Examples of such bleach activators are tetraacetylethylenediamine, sodium p-acetoxybenzene sulfonate and sodium p-heptanoyloxybenzene sulfonate.